29 May 2017 2:17 PM

Happy Oak Apple Day! I hope you are enjoying the holiday. It was supposed to be celebrated ‘for ever’ on 29th May, in commemoration of the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and of the escape abroad of Charles II (partly by hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel) , after his defeat by Cromwell at Worcester.

I read in Wikipedia that those who failed to wear a sprig of oak leaves that day risked being pelted with birds’ eggs, thrashed with nettles or pinched on the behind, which suggests to me that it has its origins in something much, much older than the Restoration. I think I can recall some mention of it during my childhood, though I don’t recall ever seeing anyone wearing a sprig of oak-leaves. But we all knew the story of Charles the Second’s escape and his concealment in the oak tree (hence all those pubs called 'The Royal Oak') , which was then part of history, which stretched a good way further back into the past, through many more open doors than there are now, and has now become legend (and will no doubt eventually become myth, or is it the other way round?).

Oak Apple Day was officially abolished in 1859, when the highly political Church services marking the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot and the execution or martyrdom of Charles the First were also got rid of. You can still, in the stalls of the more ancient Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, find lovely hand-worn leather-bound Prayer Books which contain these lost, forgotten services. They always make me think of the (fictional) special anti-Cromwell edition of the Prayer Book which forms the core of M.R.James’s interesting ghost story ‘The Uncommon Prayer Book’.

It is easy to see why the other two ceremonies were abolished. One was needlessly antagonistic towards Roman Catholics, and the other must have made nonconformists, who might still see some good in Cromwell, uneasy in their turn. It had by then been many years since the public view of Roman Catholics had been ferocious. While it lasted, it had been very severe and largely irrational.

Peaceful, loyal Roman Catholics had been wrongly blamed for the terroristic Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Equally peaceful Roman Catholics had been blamed, wholly falsely, for starting the Great Fire of London in 1666 . The great Monument to the Fire in London once bore the words ‘Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched’ in Latin, added to the inscription in 1681 after the alleged ‘Popish Plot’ of that year and eventually removed in 1830 at the time of Catholic Emancipation . Also excised at that time, from another panel of the Monument, were words on the column in English about the ‘burning of this Protestant city, begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction’. The last great outburst of anti-Catholic rage had been during the Gordon Riots of 1780, so graphically described in Chares Dickens’s novel ‘Barnaby Rudge’.

So the Guy Fawkes service was, by 1859, thought to be too anti-Roman Catholic. For instance, it thanked the Almighty for preserving the King and his family, Nobles, Clergy and Commons alike, from a ‘horrible and wicked enterprise’ and declared that they had been ‘by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages’ . Another prayer implored the assistance of the Lord God of Hosts in ‘scatter[ing] our enemies that delight in blood. It urged , in the spelling of the 17th century. that He ‘Infatuate and defeat their counsels, abate their pride, asswage their malice and confound their devices’,

On 30th January, the service of commemoration for ‘The Martyrdom of King Charles the First’, speaks of the King’s life being taken away by wicked hands, describes how the King fell ‘into the hands of violent and bloud-thirsty men, and [was] barbarously …murthered by them’ but it also commends the late King for praying ‘for his murtherers’ and begs that ‘this land may be freed from the vengeance of his bloud’.

By comparison the service for Oak Apple Day, though it refers to the ‘power and malice’ of the King’s enemies, is mainly a rather cheerful ceremony of thanksgiving for ther return of ther king to his kingdom, a moment I still regard as a victory for good sense, generosity and the rule of law. I’m sorry it has been abolished, and I wish we still marked Oak Apple Day.

Like the old calendar of Quarter Days, Michaelmas, Christmas, Lady Day and Midsummer, the fading feast-days of Lammas, Ascension, Whitsun and Trinity, and the parade of Saints whose celebrations are almost all now forgotten, these commemorations from deep in our past are a way of stretching out our hands behind us to touch the fingertips of those who came before, and let the know they are not forgotten. We might benefit by trying to know and understand them better.

But, as we have become city folk, for whom the past is a blank, who don’t know what an oak-apple is and in many cases couldn’t identify an oak-leaf, we finally break the long cycle of the centuries in which the dead, the living and the unborn joined hands under the oak trees of our countryside in a pact to protect and pass on what matters.

Once again I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s impossibly melancholy poem ‘Old Furniture’, which I find especially poignant because in my childhood there were many dark and much-lived-in rooms in old houses where I touched and saw old things all the time, and did not know that this open window to the past would close so completely in my own lifetime.

‘I know not how it may be with others Who sit amid relics of householdry That date from the days of their mothers' mothers, But well I know how it is with me Continually.

I see the hands of the generations That owned each shiny familiar thing In play on its knobs and indentations, And with its ancient fashioning Still dallying:

Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler, As in a mirror a candle-flame Shows images of itself, each frailer As it recedes, though the eye may frame Its shape the same.

On the clock's dull dial a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, Creeps to my sight.

On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing - As whilom--just over the strings by the nut, The tip of a bow receding, advancing In airy quivers, as if it would cut The plaintive gut.

And I see a face by that box for tinder, Glowing forth in fits from the dark, And fading again, as the linten cinder Kindles to red at the flinty spark, Or goes out stark.

Well, well. It is best to be up and doing, The world has no use for one to-day Who eyes things thus--no aim pursuing! He should not continue in this stay, But sink away.’

Share this article:

28 May 2017 8:27 AM

The BBC asked me to publish in full the following response to a query I raised with them (mentioned in my MoS column published today, 29th May 2017):

“We don’t accept your premise. This report was based on the publication of the Global Drugs Survey findings; a significant story as it found more users are ending up in hospital, as Today reported up front. It was right for Mishal to ask Dr Adam Winstock about those findings and the interview also covered the health concerns including the negative effects of cocaine use.”

which it gave to my inquiries about an item on the Radio 4 Today programme on Thursday 25th May 2017, at 6.52 a.m. You may listen to the programme here, the item begins at 52 minutes into the recording.

I had asked : '

'The item I raised with you ...

is an ‘interview’ of a Dr Adam Winstock, founder of the 'Global Drug Survey’.

It takes the form of Dr Winstock describing the problems consumers might have if they buy inferior cocaine, inn which he mentions different qualities and different prices, and treats this Class A drug (max penalty for possession seven years in prison, an unlimited fine or both, penalty for supply and production, life imprisonment plus unlimited fine , or both) as a consumer item. The Cocaine Marketing Board must have been overjoyed.

At no point discernible to me did the presenter or anyone else evince any disapproval of illegal drug taking (an activity Dr Winstock assumed to be normal among his listeners) or mention that the drug is illegal. No other argument was given airtime.

Is this due impartiality on a subject of controversy? Is it remotely responsible?'

Note: I have also complained about the item through the BBC complaints procedure. I will keep readers informed of the progress of this complaint, which has been acknowledged and which, I expect will be immediately rejected at the first stage, as every complaint I have ever made to the BBC has been. However, as I shall explain in time to those interested, there is no reason to accept these rejections, and every reason and opportunity to pursue the complaint through the system after the first rebuff.

Share this article:

Theresa May should get herself a stick-on pencil moustache, some very dark glasses and a white military uniform with lots of medals and a set of fancy epaulettes. If she’s going to behave like a Third World leader, she ought to look like one.Troops on the streets, indeed. What a futile non-answer to the problem of terrorist murder this is, and what a complete departure from centuries of British liberty.In all my travels, often to less fortunate parts of the world, troops posted on the streets have been an invariable sign of a society on the skids, and a government that prefers force to thought.How humiliating and embarrassing that such scenes should come to our great free capital.Actually, I suspect it’s something our dim state machine has wanted to do for ages, and now thinks it has the excuse for. Mrs May’s Cabinet, ignorant and lacking the robust old British loathing of such things, gave in and let it happen.What is far worse is that the idea was not then mocked and jeered off the stage by the rest of us, as the ridiculous Blair creature’s futile dispatch of tanks and troops to Heathrow was back in 2003.Year by year our hopeless egalitarian schools and our joke universities turn out more and more citizens who don’t know that you have to defend liberty all the time if you want to keep it.Can anyone explain to me how militarising the country and dotting it with armed men in camouflage battle dress (designed to help them hide in forests) is a rational response to the atrocity in Manchester? Of course not. The two have no connection.On the contrary, the sight of a once-great country over-reacting in this pointless way must cause our enemies to snigger in their bushy Islamic beards.‘Look at the infidels scurrying about at our bidding,’ they must think. Why give them this satisfaction? It seems to me, as it has for some time, that old-fashioned beat coppers with a close, intimate knowledge of the areas they patrol would be much more likely to see these atrocities coming than clanking robocops, soldiers or our vaunted and hyped ‘security’ services, who are always claiming to protect us but have failed so completely in this and several other cases. Such killers almost invariably come from among the swirling underworld of drug-taking petty criminals.The Manchester murderer, Salman Abedi, was, unsurprisingly, a cannabis abuser. His recent behaviour – yelling prayers in the street – had been strange.Ought not someone in authority to have noticed when a bearded young religious fanatic with a drug habit started buying large quantities of hair bleach? He plainly wasn’t planning to become a blond. But who was there to listen to such fears? A police car driving by at 30mph? A phone number that nobody answers? A police station that’s shut? I HAVE noticed that any dissent from the standard view of these events is met, on social media and elsewhere, with attempts to claim that my views show some sort of disrespect to the victims and their grieving families.I will not give in to this nasty dictatorship of grief.I am just as distressed by the horrors of Manchester as anyone else. I refuse to be told I’m not sad enough, because I don’t conform to the Government’s thought-free response to it, which has now been failing for many years. Nor should you be.Get the soldiers back into their barracks, and bring back proper police foot patrols.

Finally, a great film (if only you can find it)

What a joy to see an intelligent film, slick, clever, surprising fast-moving, glamorous and thoughtful. Yet I had to seek it out at a late-night showing at the back of a multiplex, where the big screens were reserved for weary sequels of sequels.If you can find Miss Sloane, starring Jessica Chastain, please see it. But how can good movies succeed if they are hidden from us?

The BBC’s finest...peddling deadly cocaine

I was banned from the BBC’s supposedly wonderful Today programme several years ago, after I gave a live on-air pasting to the pro-drug Professor David Nutt. Before that I used to get on quite a lot, but since then, nothing.I have often wondered since if the programme had a deep-seated bias against our drug laws. It always seemed to give prominent coverage to any call to soften those laws.Well, on Thursday morning, I think we got proof.Today once essential, has in recent years become so dull and complacent that I often doze off while listening.It is claimed that its audience has gone up. If so it must be composed of supermarket check-out robots, whose idea of excitement is to shout ‘Unexpected item in bagging area!’ Nobody else could actively want to listen to its lifeless daily rehearsals of Leftish conventional wisdom.But on Thursday there was an unexpected item in the drugging area. I suddenly realised I was listening to a man giving out the current prices for various kinds of cocaine.Hang on, I thought, as I shook myself into full wakefulness. The programme normally gives out exchange rates for the US dollar, and the stock market index. But the price of cocaine? This was new. Cocaine is a Class A drug under the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971. This means you can get life imprisonment for selling it, and seven years in jail for buying it. To want to know the price, or to give it out, surely condones a serious crime.And the BBC has a vested interest in being in favour of law enforcement. Its licence fee is collected under the threat of fines and imprisonment.If the BBC wants that law enforced, it must surely support all law enforcement. I can’t see it being pleased if other media gave soft, wet interviews to advocates of licence-fee evasion.Yet here was some bloke merrily discoursing on what cocaine costs, which is surely of no interest to any law-abiding person. Then, wholly unchallenged by an utterly soppy presenter, this character claimed it was ‘difficult to have honest conversations saying you can use lots of drugs with relatively low risks, for most people, if you follow some simple strategies’.Difficult? Where is it difficult? What’s difficult is to call for the law to be enforced.Who now denies that cocaine is in common, unchecked use among students, bankers, politicians and, perhaps above all, media and broadcasting types? The guest added (still uninterrupted): ‘Instead of simply saying to people, “Don’t use drugs, they’re dangerous”, that’s not a useful dialogue for people who are making informed decisions to use drugs as a wider lifestyle.‘That person might also go to yoga and be a vegetarian. You know it’s about a lifestyle choice and we need to help people stay safe with the choices they make.’I asked the BBC for a response. Not merely was that response useless in the extreme, and nothing to do with the questions I had asked, they actually asked me to use it in full.Well, I haven’t room to do that, but I will post it on my blog so that you can laugh at it.

*The BBC's reply is now posted on the blog, in the posting immediately after (and so above) this one. Or click on this link

Why this is a mad country: Applicants for jobs in nursing are being turned away because they cannot speak good enough English. The response of the authorities is to consider lowering the standards nurses are required to meet. We can all see what is wrong with this, but it will almost certainly happen.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

24 May 2017 10:21 AM

As usual, I waited for actual information to emerge before making any comment on the latest terror episode. It is a capital error to theorise without data ,as Sherlock Holmes says. However, as BBC news reports today

(the emphasis below is mine) we have some facts, which I draw to readers' attention :

'Police have named 22 year old Salman Ramadan Abedi as the person suspected of carrying out the suicide attack at Manchester Arena on Monday evening. Abedi was born in Manchester on New Year's Eve 1994 to Libyan parents, who had fled that country after becoming opponents of Colonel Gaddafi's repressive regime. Having spent a few years in London, the family moved to Manchester where his father used to do the call to prayer at a mosque in Didsbury. Abedi went to school in Manchester and on to Salford University before dropping out, and worked in a bakery. Friends remember him as a good footballer, a keen supporter of Manchester United and a user of cannabis.'He had a sister and two brothers. His mother and father are now believed to be back living in Libya, and for a while he left the UK too but he returned in the last few days.Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said Abedi had not been formally named by the coroner.'

No, I don't say all cannabis-users are terrorists

No, I don't seek to excuse militant Islam

But I do point out that terror outrages are an unusually closely-examined subset of violent crime, and that drug abuse, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, is very common in this subset. Hence I call for an inquiry into this correlation, in case it is meaningful. Why, you might ask, would anyone be against that, or seek to misrepresent my position so that this suggestion goes unnoticed and undiscussed?

Below are links to three moron-proofed and highly-recommended articles which will disabuse intelligent and reasonable readers of various false claims frequently made about my call for an inquiry into the correlation between violence and drug abuse.

Some persons, alas, are impervious to facts and reason on this. I would ask them only to keep quiet about their problem, rather than posting idiotic and unresponsive comments here which ignore the above. I am inclined, in future, to refuse to publish comments which actively misunderstand and misrepresent what I say.

Share this article:

22 May 2017 2:49 PM

Well, the next time you hear anyone from the US government going on about the horrors of the Assad ‘regime’, or indeed any other country where the internal arrangements are squalid and brutal (or the government is waging an ultra-violent war against a neighbour, or both), remind yourself of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s words, or rather lack of them, during the bizarre Trump visit to the Saudi despotism over the weekend.

After attacking restrictions on free speech in Iran (which is a good deal less repressive than Saudi Arabia), Secretary Tillerson was then asked by a reporter if he had anything to say about human rights in Saudi Arabia. He left without answering, according to the New York Times.

‘If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we've come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests,’

Which seems to me (though the use of English is execrable) to mean, national security and cash override any pious sermons we might hitherto have emitted on the subject of liberty.

The speech also contains this passage (emphases mine):

(Please note the weird use of the word ‘condition’ as a transitive verb) :

‘And so I think the real challenge many of us have as we think about constructing our policies and carrying out our policies is: How do we represent our values? And in some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can’t achieve our national security goals or our national security interests. If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.

‘ It doesn’t mean that we leave those values on the sidelines. It doesn’t mean that we don’t advocate for and aspire to freedom, human dignity, and the treatment of people the world over. We do. And we will always have that on our shoulder everywhere we go.

But I think it is – I think it’s really important that all of us understand the difference between policy and values, and in some circumstances, we should and do condition our policy engagements on people adopting certain actions as to how they treat people. They should. We should demand that. But that doesn’t mean that’s the case in every situation. And so we really have to understand, in each country or each region of the world that we’re dealing with, what are our national security interests, what are our economic prosperity interests, and then as we can advocate and advance our values, we should – but the policies can do this; the values never change.’

Which in practice means responding to questions about human rights in Saudi Arabia, especially while in Riyadh, by ignoring them completely.

I am so sorry, but after this incoherent but unpleasant oration, and after the whole extraordinary visit by President Trump to Saudi Arabia, in which the ghastly ‘special relationship’ between Washington and Riyadh has been laid bare as exactly what it is, I find it quite impossible to take seriously any future outrage on the subject of repression or liberty expressed by the US government while these gentlemen remain in office. Whatever it is that bothers Washington about Syria or Russia, it is not the freedoms of the people there.

Share this article:

Some words I wrote quite a while ago now circulate around the Internet among Corbynite Labour supporters, in a way that makes me increasingly concerned.

These words are :

‘Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense.’

The statement is perfectly true. I can’t actually trace the point when I originally said it, but I don’t dispute having said so. Indeed, I have thought it for many years and am fairly certain that I understood this fact as a result of Michael (now Lord) Dobbs’s clever political thrillers, featuring the monstrous power-hungry Tory Leader Francis Urquhart (immortalised on TV by that fine actor Ian Richardson).

As I recall, some of his characters are portrayed as using opinion polls in the ways in which I describe. This is a good way of making the point. I doubt if any real politician would ever be caught in public saying such things.

Lord Dobbs, I should stress, knows what he is writing about. He worked at a very high level in Conservative Central Office in the late Thatcher era.

What he portrayed, as I remember, was politicians devising polls on certain subjects to give the impression of public support (or disdain) for certain ideas. This could partly be obtained by leading the polled individual to a conclusion through a chain of questions which subtly pushed or pulled him or her one way or another.

The media, which tend to treat polls as oracles, would then publish the results as if they were wholly impartial measures, and the public (who are not immune to the desire to belong to the crowd) would be influenced in their opinions, about large matters of which they in fact knew little).

I believe, though I have only seen a YouTube clip, a similar idea was explored long ago in an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’.

In both dramas, political or civil service figures are shown devising questions which will manipulate those who are being polled, or which were devised and commissioned to influence [public opinion rather than to reflect it.

But when I say ‘It all makes sense’, what sense does it make?

Please grasp that it is nothing so crude as ‘all polls are rigged and they are not telling the truth’. I am absolutely not saying anything so daft. The basic research work in opinion polls conducted by the major organisations is sound. It has to be. Their main work is done not for politicians but for businesses seeking to sell their products. They need to be right, or they will be put out of business. Often what you need to watch is not the polls, but how they are presented.

I first applied the Dobbs theory in practice in the years before the 2010 election. I was quite sure that the Tories would not win that election. Indeed, my whole political position at the time (that proper conservatives should boycott the Tory Party) depended partly on that fact. Some people objected that it was wrong to help the other side win. I personally couldn’t have cared less, as I regarded the (then) New Labour and Cameron Tory Parties as indistinguishable Blairites. But in fact boycotting the Tories wasn’t going to do that. If they couldn’t win anyway, then there was no need to worry that a boycott would prevent a Tory victory. You can’t prevent something that isn’t going to happen.

Yet mainstream media kept publishing polls or running reports which implied or claimed that the Tories were on course for a smashing victory. |As far as I could make out on election night the BBC’s cameras and resources were poised for a Tory victory and an immediate Cameron drive to London for an early visit to Buckingham palace, which of course did not take place because Gordon Brown hung on in Downing Street until a Tory-Lib Dem coalition was certain.

During the long period in which Tory supremacy was assumed, in left and #right’ wing media alike, I contacted the polling organisations involved, and they kindly and generously supplied me with the actual data on which the media were basing these claims. What these showed was that the headline figures were leaving out huge numbers of abstainers and don’t knows, and so portraying a Tory vote of around 30% of the total as a huge winning surge. I can’t recall all then other details, but it was plain that the raw fieldwork was nothing like as good news for the Tories as the headlines suggested. I also knew from personal information that the Tory Party organisation in actual constituencies was decrepit beyond belief, membership having collapsed so that there simply weren’t the activists who had once got out the vote. What I didn’t know is what has recently been investigated (about visiting ‘battlebuses’) by the Electoral Commission, the Police and Crown Prosecution Service and been found to more or less OK under electoral law. I’m unsure how developed this was in 2010. It was highly-developed in 2015

The same lack of a real Tory surge was clear from local election results which were also misrepresented ( a lot of this was laziness and incuriosity, mingled with conformism, rather than an active political involvement) as being far more healthy for the Tories than they really were. The intention of this was to encourage more people to join the winning side, and I imagine it did so to some extent.

Even so, I was one of the few people on election night in 2010 who was completely unsurprised when David Cameron did not get a majority.

I was mistaken when I made the same prediction about 2015. I firmly believe this was because of the use, on a scale never seen before, of the methods I mention above and have discussed at length elsewhere, which turned out to be *too* effective, as I am quite sure that Mr Cameron never intended to get a majority.

But the point remains. Polls can be misused, misinterpreted and misunderstood. But the basic facts they reveal, carefully studied, are truthful. If their predictions are wrong it is because opinions change, or because of factors they have been unaware of . What I said about polls was never intended to be a blanket dismissal of their significance, and people should stop using it as such.